n, as time went on. The
negative side is educed by cross-questioning the writer's silence. There
were certain controversies which rent the Church in the middle and
latter half of the second century. These were such as, first, the
Paschal controversy (the proper day and mode of celebrating the Paschal
festival); secondly, the controversy about Montanism, the theatre of
which was the very region with which these Epistles are concerned. Yet,
not a word, not a hint is there, that the writer felt any interest in,
or was disturbed by, anxieties about either. A similar silence points to
the same conclusion, when we consider the absence of allusion to the
three great heresiarchs, Basilides, Marcion, and Valentinus. Give to the
first a period of notoriety conterminous with the reign of Hadrian (A.
D. 117-38), yet there is not the slightest allusion in Ignatius to the
tenets of the leader or his followers. Place Marcion some years before
the middle of the second century. Remember that he was a native of Asia
Minor and taught at Rome that there he was denounced by Polycarp as the
'first born of Satan;'[84] and that he enjoyed a world-wide reputation
for evil (according to some), for good (according to others). Yet in the
Ignatian letters there is not the faintest aquaintance with the man or
his teaching. Valentinus also taught at Rome (c. A. D. 140-60), and his
strange theories about _AEons_ and Ogdoads, about spiritual, psychical,
and material men, or any other fantasy of his speculative mythology,
were not thought beneath the criticism of an Irenaeus, a Clement of
Alexandria and a Tertullian. Yet no hint is there in the Seven Epistles
that these thoughts were familiar to the writer. At one time an exultant
Daille found in his reading of 'Magn.' 8 an attack on Valentinianism,
and consequently a welcome anachronism which proved the writer of the
letters a forger. The discovery of the true reading has been followed
not only by the collapse of the objection, but also by the adhesion to
the belief, that the writer's use of certain expressions is a testimony
to his existence in a pre-Valentinian epoch, when language had not been
abused to heretical ends.

Dr. Harnack has little to say against the Bishop of Durham's conclusions
from the negative side of the investigation of these theological
polemics; but he has much to say against the Bishop's deductions from
the positive aspect of them. Though, says Bishop Lightfoot,

'in the T